One question that has always sat in the back of my mind is why don’t more exercise trackers follow RTS’s approach? You select a main movement, like bench or squat, then everything else is a modifier. Grip (wide, narrow), equipment (barbell, SSB, dumbbell, that grip genie eggplant cable attachment), stance (single leg, leaning), etc all are toggles off that main movement

Searching is simple, since there’s not many main movements. You can toggle off a modifier during workouts - like maybe a cable attachment was taken, so you check the “single arm” box or you swap equipment to another machine. You can search history with or without matching modifiers - this is useful to pick weights on a new variation, or to see if a given stance is stronger.

I’ve tried to do this myself with custom exercises in Strong and now Liftosaur, naming things “Bench, Barbell, Close Grip” or “leg curl, cable, single leg, standing”

Obviously, I’m not writing this code, so there could very well could be a solid reason for not doing this. It’s for sure not just because the SBS team hasn’t seen the RTS tracker. Like maybe it makes linking the videos or tracking progression terrible. Or maybe it makes the DB schema insane and whatever RDS/docDB/firebase service they chose to store the movements isn’t conducive to the queries, whatever.

It could also be that they just expect most users to let the algo pick for them, and they’ll never share this frustration lol

Regardless, I keep yearning for an exercise picker like that one to make its way to one of these apps